2/2/10

Our friend David Ellenson opined in 2007 in the Forward about the Orthodox rabbis in Israel who were saying that Reform Judaism is the cause of the Holocaust and who refuse to give legitimacy to the Reform rabbinate.

This pains Ellenson as it should since he is the head of the Reform seminary,president of Hebrew Union College-Jewish Institute of Religion.

But this Orthodox rhetoric no longer bothers us. Our rebbe, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, would say about pronouncements like those of Mordecai Eliyahu, the former Israeli chief Sephardic rabbi, that they are essentially sorcery - neither theology nor history - but rather the equivalent of witchcraft, magic or the occult.

And we say that pushing a Reform rabbi out of a memorial ceremony is nothing more than sheer bullying.

So, if these Orthodox "rabbis" want to be known as sorcerers and bullies, they have our blessing. But in our eyes they are no longer "rabbis."

Several weeks ago, the former Israeli chief Sephardic rabbi, Mordecai Eliyahu, charged that the Holocaust was divine punishment meted out against our people on account of the sin of Reform Judaism. Such an accusation is infuriating, and unleashes unnecessary hatred and incitement among Jews.

But there is unfortunately nothing particularly novel about this obscenity. I heard this charge made from the pulpit of my Orthodox synagogue by a rabbi when I was a teenager, and all students of modern Jewish intellectual history and thought are aware that the Satmar rebbe issued this charge against Reform and secular Zionism in the years immediately after World War II.

Indeed, it is commonplace enough that I might not have been moved to speak out were it not for a second incident that occurred at a memorial ceremony in Israel, in the coastal city of Hod Hasharon... more